86 Chapter 5
emphasis, while maintaining harmonic continuity. ”^74 Though Kepler did not use this
precise term, he clearly understands that the cosmic harmony can immensely delay its final
cadence through specific musical artifice.
Here again Kepler looks to compositional practice, in which “ Man, aping his Creator,
has at last found a method of singing in harmony which was unknown to the ancients, so
that he might play, that is to say, the perpetuity of the whole of cosmic time in some brief
fraction of an hour, by the artificial concert of several voices, and taste up to a point the
satisfaction of God his Maker in His works by a most delightful sense of pleasure felt in
this imitator of God, Music. ”^75 Kepler claims these cosmic dissonances and deceptive
cadences are really pleasure made excruciating through delayed gratification. Compared
to God, we experience the cosmic harmonies immensely dilated and slowed almost beyond
intelligibility, but a work like Lasso ’ s motet allows us to taste the ecstasy of deceptive
cadence that is the divine pleasure.
Of course, this opens the question of whether and when a full resolution might occur.
Kepler considers several possibilities. Harmonies between three planets happen rather
often, but “ harmonies of four planets now begin to be scattered over centuries, and those
of five planets over myriads of years. However, an agreement together of all six is hedged
about by very long gaps of ages; and I do not know whether it is altogether impossible
for it to occur twice, by a precise rotation, and it rather demonstrates that there was some
beginning of time, from which every age of the world has descended. ”^76 He seems to
concede that “ if there could occur one single six-fold harmony, or one outstanding one
among several, that undoubtedly could be taken as characterizing the Creation. ” Yet his
initial if marks this as hypothetical, allowing some doubt whether that initial concord really
took place. If so, the uniqueness of the instant of creation is somewhat shadowed, opening
the unorthodox possibility that there was no such moment.
Without fully resolving this problem, Kepler seems rather to follow the imitative texture
used in In me transierunt , common to Lasso and his contemporaries. As the voices enter
one by one in Lasso ’ s motet, without an initial concord of all, Kepler considers the planets
successively by pairs and then in larger groups (as you can do for yourself in ♪ sound
example 5.6). Though there is nothing in astronomy that compels him to do so, “ for some
unknown reason this wonderful agreement with human melody forces me so that I am
compelled ” to identify planets with soprano, alto, tenor, and bass parts.^77 Throughout,
Kepler relies on musical practice to guide his steps. He considers skeletons of the planetary
melodies, recalling the skeleton he constructed for Victimae paschali , and considers how
those skeletons could align to form harmonies of all six planets together. After a long
series of propositions, Kepler concludes that musical and geometric constraints dictate the
spacing of the planets as we find them.
In all this, the issue of the final cadence remains open. Just after stating what we now
call his third law, Kepler had noted that “ if we suppose an infinity of time, all the states